Movie Review: The Wild Goose Lake

The Wild Goose Lake *** / *****

Directed by: Yi'nan Diao.

Written by: Yi'nan Diao.

Starring: Ge Hu (Zenong Zhou), Lun-Mei Kwei (Aiai Liu), Fan Liao (Captain Liu), Regina Wan (Shujun Yang), Dao Qi (Hua Hua), Jue Huang (Yan Ge), Yicong Zhang (Xiao Dongbei), Chloe Maayan (Ping Ping).

 

After two films, it is clear that Chinese filmmaker Yi’nan Diao is a gifted stylist – with noir being his primary interest. Like his first film, Black Coal, Thin Ice, his long awaited for follow-up The Wild Goose Lake is visually striking through – especially in the early stages, where Diao leans heavily on those noirs influences. Also like his last film, The Wild Goose Lake shows that narrative is no Diao’s strong suit – not even something he’s all that interested in, which is odd because The Wild Goose Lake’s plot is overly complicated and hard to follow, even though it’s clear that Diao’s interest is in the staging, not the storytelling. After that promising opening, the film drags a little in its second act, coming around for a fine (if drawn out) climax. It convinced me that while I will continue to watch anything Diao makes because his films look so good, I do wish he would get a screenwriter.

 

The film stars Ge Hu as Zenong Zhou. When the film opens, ex-con Zhou is working for a large crew of gangster who divide up the area to steal motorbikes – and a rival crew wants the area Zhou has been given, the whole thing leading to a fight, a shooting, a competition, a beheading, and finally Zhou killing a cop. He is identified quickly as the suspect – and a large reward placed on his head. Zhou has no intention of getting away – he knows he will be caught. All he wants is to find a way to ensure that his estranged wife (and son) get the reward money. Thus follows a way too complicated plot where Zhou hides out in the crime ridden title town, and teams up with a prostitute, Aiai Liu (Lun-Mei Kwei) to try and get the money – all while being pursued by cops and criminals alike.

 

The film looks great in those opening scenes – the scenes of the quick gang war that leads to the cop shooting are a wonderful play between dark and neon, and the scenes where Zhou and Liu first meet are classic rain soaked noir stylistics. Diao clearly knows what he’s doing. And that continues throughout the film – where Diao is far more interested in visual storytelling than anything else. The film can be graphically, and over-the-top in its violence – the previously mentioned beheading has nothing on what happens late in the film featuring an umbrella – but just as often, Diao impresses with what he doesn’t put on screen, and the way he reveals violence that just happened off-screen. I’m not quite sure the film ever quite captures the visual magic of the opening act again – but there are brilliant moments throughout.

 

None of this really helps the story too much. The story isn’t all that complicated when you look back at the film – but while watching it, it is confusing as well. The characters don’t add much either – they are one note noir archetypes from the start, and don’t get much deeper. A joyless sex scene late in the film doesn’t add anything – perhaps if you know that while its not graphic at all (at least until the spitting) it’s pretty graphic for a mainstream Chinese film – which may just mean Diao put it in to see how far he could push things.

 

The extended climax of the film works though – this is a movie where there is a lot of chasing, where the characters are always being chased, or chasing others, something both at the same time – and eventually, of course, all those chases need to come to an end. And when that arrives, it is a series of extended, brutal sequences that work very well – in part because Diao doesn’t pitch them all at the same visual style, and allows a little time to breath (the final shot of the movie doesn’t work – at least not at the length it goes on, which feels like forever).

 

Diao is obviously a talented filmmaker – and one on the rise. Black Coal, Thin Ice won the Golden Lion at Berlin in 2014, and The Wild Goose Lake made the official Cannes competition lineup this year. As a visual stylist, Diao is clearly great. But at some point, he’s going to have to learn how to tell a better story – or give us something other than the visuals to care about.

Movie Review: Blood on Her Name

Blood on Her Name *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Matthew Pope.

Written by: Don M. Thompson & Matthew Pope.

Starring: Bethany Anne Lind (Leigh Tiller), Will Patton (Richard Tiller), Elisabeth Röhm (Dani Wilson), Jared Ivers (Ryan Tiller), Jimmy Gonzales (Reynoso Dias), Jack Andrews (Travis), Chandler Head (Young Leigh), Tony Vaughn (Nathan Parrish), Joshua Mikel (Reed).

 

Blood on Her Name is a classically structured, old school noir – where a normal person makes one bad mistake, then ends up compounding that mistake with others, although based on good intentions. Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind) is not a bad person – she is trying to raise her teenage son, who has already had issues with the law, by herself after her husband was arrested and sent to jail for running stolen cars out of their repair shop, Now, the business is struggling and she is just trying to survive. We meet her when the first mistake has already been made – a man is lying on the floor of the repair shop, dead, blood pouring out of his skull that has been bashed in my wrench. Her son, Ryan (Jared Ivers) saw the man at least – but she is trying to pass it off as a random break-in – just some junkie, looking to score some money. We get the sense however that this isn’t the whole story – and over the course of Blood on Her Name, that story will come out.

 

In many ways, Blood on Her Name would feel at home with any number of noirs from the 1940s – except, of course, it wouldn’t be a female at the center of the narrative. But Leigh has a lot in common with those noir protagonists – normal people who get themselves in over their heads, and then cannot get out of it. If she was a worse person, she’d probably be okay. But she has a conscience – and when looking at the dead man’s phone, right before she intends to dump him in a swamp, from which he probably won’t be discovered,  she sees message from the man’s son – and decides she cannot let his people wonder what happened to him for the rest of their lives. Her act of “kindness” is to leave the dead man in his family’s shed – where at least they’ll know what happened to him. That, of course, turns out to be a massive mistake. And the noose starts to tighten.

 

Blood on Her Name doesn’t do anything particularly new or novel in its narrative. It is a film about this normal woman, who gets in over her head, and cannot find a way out – each action rippling with more consequences that she didn’t foresee coming when she does them. It is a small-town film – but not quite one of those small towns where everyone knows everyone. This is one where people keep to themselves – and don’t want to get involved. It is a film full of rundown buildings, trailer parks, seedy motels, and ramshackle homes. There is a certain degree of class here – but the “haves” and the “have-nots” aren’t very far apart. The only cop in the film, played by Will Patton, is Leigh’s father – and their past indicates perhaps just why there are lines she will not cross, even if logically speaking, she should. He seems representative of the type of cops they have in this town – ones that don’t seem to try very hard to solve crimes, if the victim isn’t someone they care about.

 

Lind holds the movie together with her excellent performance as Leigh – who more than anything, just comes across as tired. This is writer/director Matthew Pope’s directorial debut – and he’s smart with it. He doesn’t try to do too much, doesn’t try and push things too far. He gets the feeling of this town right, of these people – desperate people doing what they can to get by. This is when mistakes are made.

Movie Review: The Gentlemen

The Gentlemen *** / *****

Directed by: Guy Ritchie.

Written by: Guy Ritchie and Ivan Atkinson & Marn Davies.

Starring: Matthew McConaughey (Mickey Pearson), Charlie Hunnam (Raymond), Michelle Dockery (Rosalind), Jeremy Strong (Cannabis Kingpin Mathew), Colin Farrell (Coach), Henry Golding (Dry Eye), Hugh Grant (Fletcher), Jason Wong (Phuc), Christopher Evangelou (Primetime), Eliot Sumner (Laura Pressfield).

 

Guy Ritchie’s two best films remain his first two – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – which were (rightly) considered at the time as among the better of the main Quentin Tarantino clones that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Neither film was great – but they captured they had energy, were entertaining, and had some great performances in them. In the many years since, Ritchie has often maintained that kind of hyper-stylization, but he has applied them studio tent poles like Sherlock Holmes or would-be tent poles like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (a film I like more in retrospect than I did at the time) – although in films like last year’s Aladdin, he pretty much had to mute all of that to appease Disney. His latest film, The Gentlemen, is being marketed as a return to that kind of filmmaking – and so it is – yet I could help but think as I watched the film that it felt more like a clone of those earlier films, which were as mentioned, a clone of Tarantino films – so what we have here is a clone of a clone, and while the result is entertaining for the most part, I’m not quite sure I see the point of it.

 

The Gentlemen has an interesting structure – with P.I. Fletcher (Hugh Grant, clearly having almost as much as he did in Paddington 2) telling a story to Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) in the hopes that Raymond can convince his boss, Mickey (Matthew McConaughey) to pay him a lot of money to stop him from taking the story to the papers. It’s the story of how Mickey became the biggest pot dealer in England, and how he’s trying to cash out now by selling his business to Matthew (Jeremy Strong), while fending off a takeover bid by Dry Eye (Henry Goldin). Twists and turns abound – involving all sorts of unsavory characters – including Coach (a scene stealing Colin Farrell), and the young men he trains at boxing. Lots of death, lots of drug, lots of swearing follow.

 

I found it hard to care too much about anything that happens in the movie – these are all objectively awful people, and perhaps even worse, there’s no one here – aside from Farrell – who you really root for in spite of that. Any outcome then – no matters how lives, who dies, who wins, who loses, doesn’t really matter. Still, it’s all wrapped up in an entertaining package. Ritchie’s writing still plays like someone trying to imitate Tarantino from 25 years ago, with some British slang thrown in – but he’s got such a talented cast, that they’re able to deliver it all in a way that works. Farrell and Grant are the best at this – although McConaughey is having fun here as well. Hunnam is his usual stereotypical dull character – but Ritchie leans into that a little, by making Raymond so calm throughout that the fact that he’s a little boring doesn’t really hurt him. It’s clear for someone like Michelle Dockery, of Downton Abbey fame, her role here is an attempt to complicate the image people have of her – with mixed results, and for Henry Golding, it’s perhaps to play someone who isn’t so damn perfect. I’m not quite sure what the hell Jeremy Strong, so great on Succession, is doing here but I almost suspect it’s something like Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects, who found the character so dull as written, that he did something to amuse himself, and it worked.

 

There’s not much more to The Gentlemen than that. It’s pretty much a Guy Ritchie reboot of those old films, so if you’re nostalgic for them, then boy is this the movie you. It’s got the same style, the same writing, the same energy as those earlier films – and if no one quite reaches the heights of Brad Pitt in Snatch, well, at least it’s not for a lack of trying. The film does have perhaps a little too much of a studio sheen to it – something Lock, Stock and Snatch didn’t really have – but I suppose you cannot spend as long as Ritchie has churning out intellectual property content without some of it rubbing off on you. The Gentlemen is a fun diversion then at best – a reminder of why Ritchie was seen as a very promising director 20 years ago when burst onto the scene, but also further proof that he hasn’t really advanced since then.

Movie Review: The Kitchen

The Kitchen ** / *****

Directed by: Andrea Berloff.

Written by: Andrea Berloff based on the comic book series by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle.

Starring: Melissa McCarthy (Kathy Brennan), Tiffany Haddish (Ruby O'Carroll), Elisabeth Moss (Claire Walsh), Domhnall Gleeson (Gabriel O'Malley), James Badge Dale (Kevin O'Carroll), Brian d'Arcy James (Jimmy Brennan), Jeremy Bobb (Rob Walsh), Margo Martindale (Helen O’Carroll), Bill Camp (Alfonso Coretti), Common (Gary Silvers), E.J. Bonilla (Gonzalo Martinez), Myk Watford (Little Jackie),Wayne Duvall (Larry), Pamela Dunlap (Mary), John Sharian (Duffy), Brian Tarantina (Burns), Will Swenson (Michael Mariano), Annabella Sciorra (Maria Coretti), Bernie McInerney (Paul Hogan), Sharon Washington (Estelle), Matt Helm (Colin), Angus O’Brien (Mark Williams).

 

The Kitchen is a movie that feels like the entire first season of a television show crammed into 100 minutes. It could be a good TV show – the cast is excellent, and some individual scenes work, but overall the movie lacks any real flow or coherence. It feels like a lot of character development and plots points are happening off-screen, between scenes, and so in every scene you have to reorient yourself to whatever the new reality is based on how the actors are playing it. The film is based on a little known DC comic, but it seems to want to cram in an entire run into one film – instead of perhaps something that work better, like being an introduction to the series – an origin story. It’s the type of movie that gives you whiplash, because it jumps around so much without much in the way of rhyme or reason.

 

The film takes place in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen – and focuses on three wives of some fairly low-level mobsters. When their husbands are sent to jail for three years, and the “family” doesn’t give them much in the way of support Kathy Brennan (Melissa McCarthy), Ruby O’Carroll (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire Walsh (Elisabeth he Moss) decide they’re going to take over the protection racket in Hell’s Kitchen. You would think this would be a complicated process, but no – not really. They simply go door-to-door and tell the businesses that they’ll play them now, and they say okay. While this does spark a war of sorts with the current boss – Little Jackie – it doesn’t last very long (the way it ends is truly one of the more bizarre, out-of-the-blue moments in any movie I can think of). Soon, they have some muscle in the form of Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson) – a veteran with some mental issues – who falls in love with Claire. Claire goes from meek domestic abuse victim to full blown psychopath is record time. And Kathy and Ruby figure out that there are actually really good at running things – and don’t plan to back down for anyone, not even each other.

 

There’s more – a lot more – plot in The Kitchen, and dozens of minor characters that the movie wants us to keep straight and care about, despite the fact that they are barely introduced by the time some of them are murdered. There are rogue cops and FBI agents, dozens of minor gangsters, Hasidic Jews, Italian mobsters from Brooklyn, the three women’s husbands, and one of their mothers (Margo Martindale), who apparently is very well respected by the “family”, although we don’t know why. All of this robs the films of what could have made it so interesting – Claire’s transformation into the psychopath she becomes, how Ruby, a black woman, navigates the Irish dominated Hell’s Kitchen that basically hates her, and how Kathy goes from full on school mom, into a powerful, intelligent gangster. When you’re adapting anything for another medium – especially one that has the freedom to tell its story over a longer period of time, you have to boil it down to its essentials – figure out what the main thrust of what you want to say is. The Kitchen plays as if it wanted everything, all at once. And as a result, nothing really works.

 

And all that is a shame, because I would have loved to see a movie where the trio of talented leads – McCarthy, Haddish and Moss – really got to stretch out and take over. There is enough there is each performance to suggest that each could have easily done that, if given the chance. But writer/director Andrea Berloff tries to tell way too much story, so almost none of it works. Perhaps a miniseries would work – or a TV series. But as it stands, The Kitchen is a giant, unsatisfying mess.

Movie Review: Little Woods

Little Woods *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Nia DaCosta.

Written by: Nia DaCosta.

Starring: Tessa Thompson (Ollie), Lily James (Deb), Luke Kirby (Bill), Lance Reddick (Carter), James Badge Dale (Ian), Elizabeth Maxwell (Jenny), Luci Christian (Sheila), Morgana Shaw (Gerry), Joe Stevens (Jack), Brandon Potter (Dale), Max Hartman (Officer Minnerath), Jeremy St. James (Mike), Charlie Ray Reid (Johnny), Lydia Tracy (Jody).

 

Nia DaCosta’s debut film Little Woods is a kind of modern noir/Western for the opioid epidemic years. It features two strong performances by Tessa Thompson and Lily James, playing half-sisters with no real options in terms of their financial situation. They compete to see who is more desperate – and there is really no way out for either of them. But they try – they could become resigned to their fate, but they aren’t. They fight, even if their options are limited. It offers no easy answers – not even in the end. It’s a film that brings to mind films like Frozen River, Winter’s Bone or Wind River – although it’s not as good as the first two of those. All too often, DaCosta’s screenplay spells everything out in a way that isn’t necessary, given how strong the two lead performances are, and how much the actresses communicate without saying exactly what is on their mind.

 

Thompson stars as Ollie – a woman in the final days of her probation for selling drugs. She smuggled prescription drugs from Canada into North Dakota – some for her sick mother (no dead) and others more dangerous, like OxyContin. We see some of her former clients – they are not the kind of strung out junkie’s movies often portray – but addicts who are in pain, started taking these drugs for their intended purpose – pain relief – and have now been cut off. But if they stop, the pain comes back – and if that happens, they’ll miss work, be fired, and be out on the street. What are they supposed to do? Ollie has her sights set on a new life – one that requires a move out of town, and a new job. Her P.O. (Lance Reddick) has setup an interview for her – and if she gets the job, she can start again. She won’t be rich – but she’ll be out.

 

Things are complicated by her half-sister Deb (Lily James) – already raising one son by herself, who is pregnant again. The dad is the same – drug dealer Ian (James Badge Dale) – who keeps coming back, but fails to offer much support. Deb has no insurance – an abortion isn’t cheap or easy to get where she is, and having the baby is even more expensive – and that’s just literally to give birth. Their mom’s house is about to be foreclosed on as well – unless they can come up with a few thousand dollars. Given all of this, it’s no wonder Ollie makes the decisions she does – and eventually drags Deb in with her.

 

Thompson has always been a fine actress – but rarely has she been given a role with the depth of Ollie. It’s a role where she is at her best the quieter she is. You can see her thinking, calculating what needs to be done, and how in order to get what she and her sister needs to get out from under. Or the panic and frustration when things don’t go as planned – until she figures out the next steps. James is nearly as good as Deb – a woman prone to making one bad decision after another, but is a good person at heart. She just cannot figure what to do next.

 

The rest of the actors in the film are fine – even if they aren’t really given the material to be much more then archetypes for most of the runtime. They are all fine – Luke Kirby can be downright scary at times and Lance Reddick is legitimately sympathetic. James Badge Dale delivers a fine performance as this pathetic man who cannot bring himself to do what he knows he should on a consistent basis. He’s a weak man, pretending to be strong.

 

DaCosta’s direction is stronger than her writing. The film looks every bit as good as those other films mentioned off the top – Frozen River, Winter’s Bone, Wind River. And the performances are almost as strong as well – at least the leads. And yet, the dialogue sometimes lets them down. It’s too on the nose to be truly effective – too clichéd. It’s to the credit of Thompson and James that they make most of it work – but the film underlines everything too much when the characters talk. Still, there is so much here to like, it’s hard to complain too much – and impossible not to get excited to see what DaCosta does next (apparently, it’s the Candyman remake/reboot/sequel). She’s certainly a director to watch.

Movie Review: Dragged Across Concrete

Dragged Across Concrete **** / *****

Directed by: S. Craig Zahler.

Written by: S. Craig Zahler.

Starring: Mel Gibson (Brett Ridgeman), Vince Vaughn (Anthony Lurasetti), Tory Kittles (Henry Johns), Michael Jai White (Biscuit), Thomas Kretschmann (Lorentz Vogelmann), Jennifer Carpenter (Kelly Summer), Laurie Holden (Melanie Ridgeman), Don Johnson (Chief Lt. Calvert), Udo Kier (Friedrich), Fred Melamed (Mr. Edmington), Justine Warrington (Cheryl), Matthew MacCaull (Grey Gloves), Primo Allon (Black Gloves), Jordyn Ashley Olson (Sara Ridgeman), Myles Truitt (Ethan Jones), Tattiawna Jones (Denise), Richard Newman (Feinbaum), Vivian Ng (Lana), Andrew Dunbar (Jeffrey), Noel (Vasquez).

 

There’s a scene early in S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete in which the director seems to be daring his critics to get offended. In it, two white copes – played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn – are questioning a young Latino woman who wears hearing aids – and although her English is perfectly clear to those of us in the audience – you don’t even have to strain to make out the words – the two cops act as if they cannot understand a word she is saying. It is an admittedly juvenile provocation by Zahler – a way to clap back at his critics, who he knows are out there, and he knows he’s going to offend, and he doesn’t much care. You would think just casting Mel Gibson in the lead role would be enough of a sign that Zahler doesn’t care about offending people – but just in case you someone wandered in and didn’t know, Zahler makes sure you know right off the bat. And yet, that scene isn’t really indicative of the rest of the movie. The films racial politics – and gender politics for that matter – are more complicated than you would think a movie with that opening scene would be. Zahler has created a world here in which the cops are racist – at least a little – but they are also family men. They will cross the line into becoming criminals – yet they aren’t the worst criminals in the film. The two major black characters in the movie are criminals as well – but again, they aren’t the worst of the worst. They seemed trapped between the cops who are out to bust them, and the real criminals who exploit them. It’s a film that basically stops for 15 minutes at its mid-point, to tell the story of a bank employee on her first day going back to work after giving birth, just so that when a robbery happens at her bank at the end of that sequence, you care about her in a way you don’t about bank employees in robbery scenes. Dragged Across Concrete is a complicated moral landscape, where no one is innocent.

 

Like Zahler’s other two films – the violent horror/Western Bone Tomahawk and the crime drama Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete is far longer than you would expect a genre film like this to be. It isn’t quite as extended as Brawl in Cell Block 99 was – which I liked to describe as a movie called Brawl in Cell Block 99 which takes two hours to even get to Cell Block 99 and another 20 minutes before the brawl breaks out. When it gets there though, watch out. Both of them films have already developed a cult following – and Dragged Across Concrete will as well. This film can be neatly divided in two – with everything leading up to that robbery at the midpoint happening over a few days, and then everything after that robbery happening over one long night. The film will get violent – very violent – although not as much as his other two.

 

Gibson and Vaughn star as two detective – Ridgeman and Lurasetti. Ridgeman is old – he’s approaching 60 – and he hasn’t been promoted in decades – he says because he refuses to play the political games, which is assholes says to excuse their asshole behavior. Ridgeman is tired – he has a sick wife, and a teenage daughter who gets harassed daily, all because he cannot afford to live in a better neighborhood. Lurasetti seems cheerier than his older partner – if no less of an asshole. He speaks like no cop (or really, no person) has ever spoken – with the weird cadence of Zahler’s dialogue. Vaughn probably says more in the opening scene here than he did throughout all of Brawl in Cell Block 99 (which is the best performance of his career). The two cops get suspended for being too rough on a suspect – which of course, was captured on a cellphone. With more time on his hands, Ridgeman becomes determined to rip off a criminal – why should they have money, when he doesn’t. Which will lead, inevitably, to that bank robbery. The other storyline, that gets much less time, follows Henry (Tory Kittles), a young black man just out of prison, who wants to find the money to support his mom, and his little brother – confined to a wheelchair because of a stray bullet. He too, will of course, end up at that robbery.

 

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the difference between depiction and endorsement – and its often in the oddest movies (like The Wolf of Wall Street, which clearly thought its main characters were trash, even as it had fun with them). Here, Zahler seems to be deliberately walking the line between the two of them. He doesn’t try and hide the fact that his cops are racist – at least a little – or sexist. They express their disappointment in the modern PC world, and complain it gets in their way. Does Zahler agree – or is it just his characters bullshitting? Casting Gibson is a deliberate provocation in and of itself – but Zahler gives him the best role he’s had in years, and Gibson delivers one of his best all time performances. It would have been smart casting even if Gibson had not exposed himself to be racist in past incidents, as this is the inevitable end of the road for so many of his characters from prior films – burnt out and bitter, his shtick that was once so charming no turned sad and pathetic. This may just be the saddest Gibson has ever been in a film.

 

Yes, the film seems to deliberately want to provoke a reaction from you – whether it needles you with some dialogue that could reasonably be called racist, sometimes in serious scenes, sometimes in jokey ones (like Vaughn saying he cannot be racist because he orders dark roast on Martin Luther King Day). But then it gives Vaughn a black girlfriend, who he clearly loves, and who clearly loves him. Does that mean he cannot be racist? Of course not. But I do think some of it implies that what we see isn’t all we get.

 

More than anything, Dragged Across Concrete is a character piece. You will have to decide what to make of its characters, and whether it means anything larger. In a way, the film reminded me a little bit of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (which is perhaps just because I’ve been thinking of that film a lot since Under the Silver Lake). That film basically took Philip Marlowe, a man with a moral code, with plopped him in a word where no one had one of those anymore. That’s kind of what Dragged Across Concrete does – pulls a bunch of characters that would have looked completely normal in a cop movie from a couple of decades ago, and plopped them into a world with PC culture and cell phones. The results aren’t pretty.

Movie Review: A Dark Place

A Dark Place ** / *****

Directed by: Simon Fellows.

Written by: Brendan Higgins.

Starring: Andrew Scott (Donald Devlin), Bronagh Waugh (Donna Reutzel), Denise Gough (Linda Connolly), Catherine Dyer (Mrs. Pomorski), J.D. Evermore (Cal Worbley), Jason Davis (Jerry Zeigler), Jared Bankens (George Atzerodt), Sandra Ellis Lafferty (Betty Devlin), Griff Furst (Max Himmler), Christian Finlayson (Justin Zeigler), Christa Beth Campbell (Wendy Connelly), Michael Rose (Sheriff Mooney), Cory Scott Allen (Randy), Eric Mendenhall (Bill Frankel), Andrew Masset (Dr. Joel Pomorowski), Kevin Patrick Murphy (Charlie), Nolan Cook (Tyler Zeigler), Kate Forbes (Patty Zeigler).

 

A Dark Place is a murder mystery film that would have been better with no murder mystery at all. As a portrait of small town life, in a dying part of the country, A Dark Place (which was originally called Steel Country – a better name) can be quite interesting. And its “hero” – Donald Devlin – a garbage man, somewhere on the autism spectrum – is an interesting way into this community. For the most part, people in town ignore him – they snicker behind his back when he leaves, but for the most part, they don’t even bother to think about him at all. He has a daughter who loves him – from a very brief relationship the girl’s mother would let to forget –who he sees once a week, and he takes care of his ailing mother – confined to a wheelchair, with early signs of dementia creeping in. This film can be interesting when it looks at the drudgery of life in this part of the country, and the difficulty specific to Donald in that small-town. Unfortunately, most of the film is consumed by a murder mystery which isn’t all that interesting – and it requires Donald to do things that really should have landed him in jail – perhaps for years – before the finale – which may end up with there anyway. But then again, given everything else we see him do, apparently with no consequence, probably not.

 

The mystery at the heart of A Dark Place is the death of a little boy name Tyler – who disappeared, and was found a few days later drowned in the local creak. Donald knows the kid from his garbage route – apparently, he would wave at him whenever he drove by. On his route, after the body is found, he gets out and offers his sympathy to Tyler’s mother – who cryptically tells Donald that Tyler never would have wandered off to explore the forest as the official story says. He was too scared to go anywhere. From this detail, Donald tries to unravel what really happened. He is warned off by some, encouraged by others – and is able to get a surprising amount of information out of people who really have no reason to talk to him. Everyone in this small town seems to know everyone else – unless its convenient to the plot to have them not know who Donald is, and then they have no idea.

 

Donald is played by Andrew Scott – best known (by me anyway) for what I thought was a god awful performance as Moriarty is the BBC series Sherlock. That was a bizarrely over-the-top performance, and one of those ones where I couldn’t even figure out what Scott was going for most of the time. He is much better here – although again, he does tend towards over-the-top theatrics a little more often than he probably should. Still, it’s a good performance by Scott, and does anchor the movie – he is in nearly every frame. The rest of the cast is fine, I guess, but they never really do much to distinguish themselves. Part of this is because the movie has little time for anyone who isn’t there to advance the plot at some point – so we are introduced to people seemingly at random, so they can come back into the plot at some point to give Donald the information he needs to take the next step.

 

I liked the look and feel of A Dark Place, and think that the film could well have been a fascinating portrait of small town American life – a portrait of the type of town that is dying when an industry moves away. Their version of the big city here is Pittsburgh – and the characters talk about sometimes as if it’s some unattainable dream. That rings true – as does other, small details in the film. But the overall movie is too caught up with a mystery that doesn’t really matter – and too many bizarre plot twists to seem as unbelievable as the place they happen in.

Movie Review: Birds of Passage

Birds of Passage **** / *****

Directed by: Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra.

Written by: Maria Camila Arias & Jacques Toulemonde Vidal and Cristina Gallego.

Starring: Carmiña Martínez (Úrsula), José Acosta (Rapayet), Natalia Reyes (Zaida), Jhon Narváez (Moisés), Greider Meza (Leonídas), José Vicente (Peregrino), Juan Bautista Martínez (Aníbal), Aslenis Márquez (Indira), José Naider (Miguel Dionisio), Yanker Díaz (Leonidas as a Child), Víctor Montero (Isidoro), Joaquín Ramón (Gabriel), Jorge Lascarro (Sigifredo), Germán Epieyu (Minister), Luisa Alfaro (Victoria), Merija Uriana (Herminia). 

 

In many ways, the Colombian film Birds of Passage traffics in gangster movie clichés – you’ll find elements of The Godfather or GoodFellas or City of God throughout the terrifically entertaining film. Yes, you can complain about some of that – or the fact that the movie includes not one but two hotheads who do stupid things that screw everything up (like Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas or Lil Zee in City of God), or some of the coincidences in the plot. Yet the film works despite those minor issues, in part because the film is so well made and entertaining, but even more because it uses this backdrop to get us inside a culture we haven’t really seen on screen before – the indigenous Wayuu, of Northern Columbia, who for generations withstood outside forces who sought to control them or bring them down. The threat in Birds of Passage comes from within, as these things often do, when drugs and money become involved. The film is based on events that happened in the 20-year span between 1960 and 1980 – and if you know anything about Columbia you know it got worse from there. Here, the drug of choice is marijuana – not cocaine – but the resulting violence is the same.

 

The film doesn’t start off as a gangster movie – it starts off immersing us in the Wayuu culture – where young woman Zaida (Natalia Reyes) is set to having her coming out as a woman – ready to be married. Rapayet (Jose Acosta), a poorer man from a lesser family, immediately makes his intentions clear – he wants to marry Zaida. Zaida’s powerful mother – Ursula (Carmina Martinez) – who runs her family – isn’t convinced, and sets the dowry for her daughter ridiculously high as a way to put off Rapayet’s advances. But he is determined – and soon finds his way to get the money he needs. He has been dealing in coffee and alcohol – but seizes an opportunity when he hears some Americans in the Peace Corps want pot – a lot of pot. His uncle grows pot – and he can fix it so they can all make money. Soon, he is selling all his uncle to grow to Americans – who export it back to their country in planes – and things are good. He is married to Zaida, he is making more money than he can needs, and has become a powerful man himself. His hotheaded, non-Wayuu partner Moises (Jhon Navaez) then goes ahead and screws everything up – and while Rapayet pieces things back together, it sets the stage for another screw-up – Leonidas (Greider Meza) – a decade later – to eventually screw everything up beyond repair.

 

The film was directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra – who previously made the visually stunning Embrace of the Serpent – a black and white film that I admired visually more than I enjoyed. Here, they are working in color, and the story is stronger. They are painting on a vast canvas here – with many characters, over the span of more than a decade, and they never get lost in the weeds of the story (this is why some of those clichés and coincidences work – they help move the story along). In many ways, the gangster story here is familiar – regular guy, Rapayet, gets involved in crime, becomes bigger than he could ever imagine, but sees it all destroyed by the end – as things have spiraled into violence, greed and death. The element of the Wayuu make the film feel unique. The Wayuu are a tradition bound people – and a superstitious one. They have a way of doing things – beliefs of ghosts, and dreams as omens, word messengers that must be respected, etc. The Wayuu doesn’t rely on outside people to help them solve their problems – and they don’t trust them either. There is a tension between the old and the young here – Ursula believes wholeheartedly in the Wayuu way – but Rapayet and Zaida are trying to be, at least, somewhat more modern. What good will being Wayuu do them is it will end with them getting killed? It turns out, of course, that the way of the Wayuu only works when everyone respects it – which is easier to do when things are going well. By the end, the Wayuu may not be destroyed – but part of them has been – and no one really seems to want to deal with it. The dead have piled up.

 

Birds of Passages isn’t a perfect movie – as mentioned, it probably relies on clichés a little too much (having both Moises and then Leonaidas set in motion massive violence pretty much singlehandedly feels like a stretch). And Zaida, who we get the impression early will be a major character, is relegated to the background very early – and it’s impossible to get a handle on her as a character. And yet, it’s a fascinating, entertaining gangster movie throughout – one with more going on than normal. It is also brilliantly directed by Gallego and Guerra – who present the violence, but don’t glamorize it – much of it either happens in a flash, or off-screen. The big climax happens in a longshot, and a flash to the aftermath. They treat this story as the tragedy that it is – so even with the clichés, you feel the immense tragic nature of this story – and what has been lost.

Movie Review: Galveston

Galveston *** / *****

Directed by: Mélanie Laurent.

Written by: Jim Hammett based on the novel by Nic Pizzolatto.

Starring: Ben Foster (Roy Cady), Elle Fanning (Raquel Arceneaux), Lili Reinhart (Tiffany), María Valverde (Carmen), Beau Bridges (Stan), Robert Aramayo (Tray), Adepero Oduye (Loraine), Tinsley Price/Anniston Price (Young Tiffany), C.K. McFarland (Nancy Covington).

 

The story being told in Mélanie Laurent’s Galveston is pretty much predictable from beginning to end – it’s another crime drama about a low rent criminal, who appears to be brutal and violent, but has a sensitive soul underneath that exterior, and the much younger woman he falls in love with – even as we know this is all going to lead to tragedy. In its outline and outlook, it’s not surprising to learn it’s based on a novel by Nic Pizzolatto, the creator or True Detective, which had one great, if overwritten, season, and one that was wildly all over the map (I hold out hope for the upcoming Season 3). And yet, the film is worth seeing for a few reasons – two of them being Ben Foster and Elle Fanning, who individually make almost anything worth seeing, so having them together is great, but perhaps more importantly because director Mélanie Laurent seems to intuitively understand that the story in her movie is on rails, so she allows herself to take some chances in its telling.

 

The film stars Foster as Roy Cady, a low level enforcer in New Orleans, working for a bad man named Stan (Beau Bridges), who is given a job that is pretty much nothing except a setup to get him – and a few others killed – so Stan can cover his own tracks. It doesn’t work for Roy, who flees New Orleans, and heads back to his home town of Galveston, Texas – believing that he has terminal cancer anyway, he doesn’t much care if he dies, but he doesn’t really want to let Stan be the one who kills him. Along the way, he picks up Rocky (Fanning), a 19-year-old girl working as a prostitute, but too naïve to really understand that is what she is doing. He keeps thinking he’s going to throw her out of the car, but never does. She even convinces him to swing by her house in Orange, Texas – and as he waits in the car, he hears a gunshot, and Rocky emerges with her three-year old sister, Tiffany. They end up in a low rent motel in Galveston, run by Nancy (C.K. McFarland) – and become a de facto family of three – even if there is no sex between Roy and Rocky, mainly because he doesn’t see her that way. They even have separate rooms. But no sex doesn’t mean no love.

 

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Galveston – given its origins as a Pizzolatto novel – is how little dialogue there is (in True Detective, he LOVED his overwrought, explanatory dialogue). The movie seems to sense it’s not necessary to tell the story, and Laurent has faith in her actors to be able to express themselves without much in the way of constant chatter – and she even avoids the clichéd close-ups here as well. Roy, feeling he is at the end of his life, is trying to set some things right – he goes to see an ex-girlfriend for example, although the pain he feels when it becomes clear they view their past relationship in radically different ways, is palpable. The whole middle section of the film is given to their life at that motel – an interlude from the real forces outside that are going to descend on them – as their bond deepens. Foster is gifted at going over the top, but this year, he has no delivered two impressive, under stated performances (he is better in Leave No Trace, but he’s really good here). Fanning isn’t really playing a Manic Pixie Dream Girl – a bad habit these movies often fall into – but someone who has already experienced too much pain and suffering for someone so young.

 

The ending, when it comes, has a feeling of inevitability to it – you don’t get to walk away from people like Stan. The violence on display in that ending is sickening – but mainly because Laurent decides not to show it in graphic detail. She sticks with Roy during this time (perhaps a leftover from the novel – which was told from his point-of-view) but that doesn’t mean the ending doesn’t really pack a wallop. The films closing sequence – set 20 years in the future –perhaps tries too hard for emotional catharsis – something not needed because what happens before then works better (although, it does tie up loose ends audiences would ask about).

 

Ultimately, Galveston is not a great movie – the story remains too clichéd, and although Laurent’s telling of it is surprising, she doesn’t upend those clichés the way someone like Lynne Ramsay did in this year’s You Were Never Really Here. What she does do though is take a movie that could have been made on autopilot, and finds a different, more unique way of telling it. Give her a better script, and she’s ready to make a great movie – especially if she brings Foster and Fanning with her.

Movie Review: Sweet Virginia

Sweet Virginia *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Jamie M. Dagg   

Written by: Benjamin China & Paul China.

Starring: Jon Bernthal (Sam), Christopher Abbott (Elwood), Imogen Poots (Lila), Rosemarie DeWitt (Bernadette), Jared Abrahamson (Paul Anderson), Odessa Young (Maggie), Darcy Laurie (Marty Petrowne), Joseph Lyle Taylor (Tom Barrett).

 

Jon Bernthal has one of the most relaxed screen presence I can recall – making him perfect for a movie like Sweet Virginia, a combination of noir and western, set in contemporary Alaska. Bernthal plays Sam – a former rodeo star, who now owns and operates a local motel – and it’s to his credit, that I can easily imagine Bernthal being any of those things. In fact, in almost every role I see Bernthal play, I can often imagine him doing, quiet, normal guy labor – it’s one of his charms. The same is kind of true for Rosemarie DeWitt - who here plays Bernadette, who is having an affair with Sam behind her husband’s back. The two have an easy chemistry together, and share one of the most natural sex scenes I can recall. They are perfectly suited for each other – and this movie.

 

Because this is a noir though, we know things are going to be happy – in fact, we know that before we meet either Sam or Bernadette. The film opens in a bar, where a stranger – Elwood (Christopher Abbott) shows up, and continually tries to order the breakfast special, despite being told by the three men in the bar that they are closed. He leaves, but comes back quickly – shooting, and killing all three men. It turns out that Elwood is a killer for hire, hired by Lila (Imogen Poots), the wife of one of the men killed – because she wants his money. She’s horrified that Elwood killed two other men – including her friend’s husband (her friend being Bernadette). Lila needs her husband’s money (which turns out to be non-existent) in order to pay for his murder – so as she tries to stall Elwood, he stays at the motel owned by Sam – and the two kind of bond – although that’s mainly because Elwood won’t leave Sam alone, and Sam is too nice to complain.

 

Abbott has become an interesting actor in the last few years – but admittedly, sometimes he needs to calm down a little bit. Here, he plays a bundle of nervous energy – and ratchets the intensity of his performance up a little too much. He would likely be the prime suspect in the murders just for being weird, let alone the fact that he seems to be the only person around not everyone knows (it is a small town, of course) – but no one seems to notice him (to be fair, I don’t think the police factor in the movie at all – so they clearly don’t notice anything). Abbott here is clearly trying to contrast himself to Bernthal and his relaxed performance. He could have relaxed just a little bit though – and delivered an even better performance.

 

The film was directed by Jamie M. Dagg, who prefers his movies dark – literally – as most of the film takes place at night, much of the time in rooms where no one has though to turn on a light. It works for this type of story, and really does help to build the atmosphere. We know from the opening scenes where the film is going to end up – this is very much a classic noir setup, and has a classic noir payoff as well. It doesn’t really do anything new in that regard. But it does everything so well, that you don’t really care. And when the film focuses on Bernthal a DeWitt together, it actually builds one of the most quietly believable relationships I’ve seen in a movie this year.

Movie Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Martin McDonagh.

Written by: Martin McDonagh.

Starring: Frances McDormand (Mildred Hayes), Sam Rockwell (Officer Jason Dixon), Woody Harrelson (Sheriff Bill Willoughby), Peter Dinklage (James), Caleb Landry Jones (Red), Abbie Cornish (Anne Willoughby), Lucas Hedges (Robbie Hayes), Clarke Peters (Abercrombie), Zeljko Ivanek (Deputy), John Hawkes (Charlie), Brendan Sexton III (Crop Haired Man), Nick Searcy (Father Montgomery), Sandy Martin (Mama Dixon), Amanda Warren (Denise Watson), Darrell Britt-Gibson (Jerome).

 

It is not an easy thing that writer-director Martin McDonagh pulls off in his third, and best, feature film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This is the year’s most quotable film – full of great one liners, funnier than any comedy you will see this year. It’s also a film that completely and totally breaks your heart, and will have you in tears. It is full of complex characters that at times you will love, and times you may well hate – and which one it is may change more than once during the film. It is, simply put, one of the very best films of the year.

 

In the film, national treasure Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes – the mother of 20 year girl who six months before was raped and murdered, before he body was set on fire. The police still have made no arrests, and don’t really have any leads. So Mildred decides to up the pressure on the police – renting out three never used billboards to make her message heard loud and clear – she isn’t happy with the job the police, led by Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is doing. While you can immediately relate to the righteous anger that Mildred feels – it’s surprising how much you instantly like Willoughby as well. He’s charmingly played by Harrelson, who can give as well as he takes – and goes toe to toe with McDormand and more than holds his own. He’s dying of cancer – and thinks that may win him some sympathy from her. No such luck. There are other major characters – Deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell) isn’t the sharpest guy on the force, and already has excessive force complaints against him – but he’s extremely loyal to Willoughby and doesn’t like what Mildred is doing to him. The casting supporting these three is the best ensemble of the year – Caleb Landry Jones as the slimy ad salesman in town, Lucas Hedges as Mildred’s surviving child, who wants a normal life, John Hawkes as her ex-husband, screwing a 19 year old and best of all Peter Dinklage, who nurses a crush on Mildred. His role at first doesn’t feel like much – but his last line in the movie is both my favorite in its delivery, and changes your perspective on the film more than a little bit.

 

McDonagh – who won an Oscar for the very entertaining short Six Shooter, and followed it up with the great debut feature In Bruges (and it follow-up, Seven Psychopaths, not nearly as good, but a hell of a lot of fun) has gone deeper here than in the past. His three leads are deeply flawed, yet sympathetic characters that he makes more complicated as they go. McDormand knows this the best role she has got since Fargo, and rips into it with a vengeance – but doesn’t go the easy route, and make her one note. You start out hating Dixon – but it’s surprising just how much you like him by the end – it may well be Rockwell’s best work ever. And what can be said about Woody Harrelson, except that this is the type of role he does to perfection. The movie offers no easy answers – and the final actions that each of these characters make are not so simple themselves – and complicate our feelings towards them as well.

 

The film is set on a sprawling canvas of Middle America in a way that we often do not see. It is set in the same area (or at least state) as Netflix’s recent series Ozarks – but captures the characters better, and with less condescension. It’s a messy, poor, dead-end town with not a lot going on – that boredom, and homey small town values, giving way to something darker underneath. These people probably all voted for Trump – yet you like them all.

 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is precisely the type of film that I am a soft touch for – it’s the type of film that made me fall in love with movies as a teenager in the 1990s (had it come out then, I probably would have watched it approximately 25 times by now). But it’s hardly a throwback, and has more complex characters than many of those films did to go along with the snappy dialogue. In short, it’s the best film of its kind to come out in a long, long time.

Movie Review: Wind River

Wind River *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Taylor Sheridan.

Written by: Taylor Sheridan. 

Starring: Jeremy Renner (Cory Lambert), Elizabeth Olsen (Jane Banner), Gil Birmingham (Martin Hanson), Jon Bernthal (Matt Rayburn), Julia Jones (Wilma Lambert), Kelsey Chow (Natalie Hanson), Graham Greene (Ben), Martin Sensmeier (Chip Hanson), Tyler Laracca (Frank Walker), Gerald Tokala Clifford (Sam Littlefeather), James Jordan (Pete Mickens), Eric Lange (Dr. Whitehurst), Ian Bohen (Evan), Hugh Dillon (Curtis).

 

Over the last few years, writer Taylor Sheridan has been busy craving out a name for himself as the writer of genre pieces – crime dramas that at once feel somewhat old school, almost like Westerns, and yet modern in the issues they address. His previous screenplays for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water are undoubtedly what got him the opportunity to direct again (he apparently directed a low budget horror movie years ago – one he didn’t write). Wind River is very much of a piece with those other two films – it feels like a modern Western, full of tough characters in a lawless land. Wind River feels slightly more awkward than either of those films – the dialogue is at times too on the nose, and explains too much, or while the direction is quite good – it lacks the style of Villeneuve’s, or the workmanlike perfection of Mackenzie’s. Wind River isn’t quite the film that those other ones are – and yet, it’s another sign that Sheridan is interested in doing the type of mature, adult genre pieces Hollywood doesn’t make anymore – and the sign that he’ll be a great director in his own right – someday anyway.

 

Wind River takes place in Wyoming, in the dead of winter. Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) works essentially as a hunter – when a predator of some kind finds its way to close to people, or starts killing livestock, it’s his job to track it, and it kill it. On one of his assignments – on the Wind River Native Reservation – he finds the body of a teenage girl, shoeless, and miles from anywhere. She knows the girl – she was the best friend of his own teenage daughter, who died in similar circumstances a few years before, leading to the dissolution of his marriage to a Native American woman. He calls the tribal police – led by Ben (Graham Greene), who has to call in the FBI. They send the closet agent – Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) – who arrives from Las Vegas, in no way ready for the cold. SO starts the investigation.

 

Sheridan really isn’t interested in making a whodunit though in Wind River. The investigation unfolds in a fairly straight line – with one clue leading to the next, and so on, without so much as a red herring along the way (honestly, it could have used one or two). Sheridan is more interested in his characters than anything else – and he is helped by the strong performances of Renner, Olsen, Greene, Gil Birmingham (so memorable in Hell or High Water last year) as the dead girl’s father, and in what amounts to a cameo by Jon Bernthal – one of the few modern actors, who always feel authentic, even on shows like The Walking Dead (who has missed him terribly). It did feel a little odd to me when Sheridan ends the movie with an onscreen card telling the audience that no one is tracking missing Native American women, and it’s a huge problem, not because it isn’t a huge problem (it is, and in Canada as well, and it’s to our shame that Canada has taken so long to do anything about it) – but because while the film is about Native American issues, the Native characters themselves are supporting ones. To the films credit, it at least knows this – it is remarked on a few times how ironic it is that these white people are “here to help” and how little help they’ve been in the past.

 

Overall though, Wind River is the type of adult genre piece that used to be common, that now rarely hits multiplex screens (it may have taken a month to get there, but Wind River did open in my local theater – a rarity for a film like this). Sheridan has written better screenplays than this (is it possible he dusted off an earlier screenplay to direct himself? It kind of feels like it) – ones that aren’t quite as reliant on monologuing as this one. But the actors sell those monologues, and more importantly, they sell those quieter moments – those are the ones that will haunt you. Wind River isn’t a great film like Sicario or Hell or High Water were – but its further proof that Sheridan is the real deal.

Movie Review: Good Time

Good Time **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ben Safdie & Joshua Safdie. 

Written by: Ronald Bronstein & Joshua Safdie.

Starring: Robert Pattinson (Connie Nikas), Buddy Duress (Ray), Benny Safdie (Nick Nikas), Taliah Lennice Webster (Crystal), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Corey Ellman), Barkhad Abdi (Dash the Park Security Guard), Necro (Caliph), Peter Verby (Peter the Psychiatrist), Saida Mansoor (Agapia Nikas), Gladys Mathon (Annie).

 

You cannot help but think of the New York films of the 1970s – from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (or After Hours, although that’s the 1980s) to Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and beyond – when you watch Good Time. The film captures that same nervous energy, that sense of constant action, and impending doom, from beginning to end. Good Time is a film of constant, propulsive energy – and represents a step forward for director brother Ben and Joshua Safdie – who are among the most exciting directors of Indie films in America right now. They capture that constant hum of a city like New York – in no small part because of the great performance at its core by Robert Pattinson – whose career since the Twilight films ended hasn’t been spotless, but shows remarkable ambition, and good taste in directors. Here, he channels an actor like Pacino at the height of his 1970s power – and delivers one of the great performances of the year.

 

The film opens not on Pattinson’s Connie – but on his brother, Nick (co-director Benny Safdie) who is being interviewed by a psychiatrist about his recent difficulties. It’s clear that Nick suffers from some sort of mental disorder – although the film never specifies what. After this interview, which goes on longer than you would think it would, Connie busts in and takes Nick out of the interview – walking down the hall, he points at the other patients in the area and asks Nick, almost cruelly if he thinks he’s like them. Smash cut to the pair of brother committing a bank robbery – that seems to go off without a hitch – until during the getaway, a dye pack explodes. In the foot chase after, Connie gets away – but Nick gets arrested. Nick doesn’t do well at Rikers Island – and finds himself in the hospital. The majority of the movie takes place over one long night, in which Connie tries to find a way to get his brother out of jail/the hospital – first by trying to come up with bail, and then more adventuresome means.

 

At his core, Connie is a gifted conman – he thinks well on his feet, and through the night, as one thing after another goes wrong, Connie is able to up with one plan after another to keep himself ahead of the noose that is tightening around his neck. He may not always be great and seeing ahead four or five moves – but in the moment, he’s able to figure out the one move he needs to make to stay ahead. The camera seems to tighten on him throughout the movie – moving in closer and closer to him, trapping him – until the film climax, which pulls back in a dazzling helicopter (not drone) shot to see Connie as the rat in a maze of his own design he cannot get out of.

 

I’ve heard Good Time described as a crime film about white privilege, and while I’m not sure I’d say the movie is “about” that, it certainly acknowledges the advantage Connie has because he is white – and how he exploits it. From the bank robbery itself – where both he and Nick don masks that make them look like black men, to the elderly woman into whose apartment he cons his way into, to her teenage granddaughter he seduces, to the security guard at a seedy “amusement park” (Oscar nominee Barkhad Abdi – it is black people who are most hurt by Connie’s actions, and who he exploits.

 

There is a point – while at the woman’s apartment – where I almost felt like the movie had painted itself into a narrative corner it couldn’t escape – and that is when Ray (Buddy Durress) – shows up, with a story so convoluted, and brilliantly told, it almost acts as its own short film within the film. Ray isn’t any better than Connie – in some ways he’s worse, and not as charming to boot, but he gives the movie a shot in the arm, and sends it hurtling towards its brilliant climax.

 

Good Time is the kind of gritty, small scale crime drama you do not see made much anymore. The Safdies made the film for little money, grabbing shots where they could, and getting great performances by pros and near amateurs alike. Pattinson has never been better. You like him despite yourself, and then gradually realize how monstrous he is (this is something the Safdies have specialized in during their careers). He has turned himself into an ambitious actor with an impressive list of directors he’s work with – David Michod (The Rover), David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis, Map to the Stars), James Gray (The Lost City of Z), Werner Herzog (Queen of the Desert) – and upcoming projects by Claire Denis, the Zellner brothers, Olivier Assayas, Harmony Korine and Joanna Hogg. I was hard on Pattinson during the Twilight films – and with good reason, unlike co-star Kristen Stewart, he was painfully awkward in those films – but while not all of his performances have been great since then, he has shown more range, skill and ambition than I would have thought he would. Here, he is a brilliant bundle of nervous energy – it is a great performance at the heart of a great film.